Who supplies digital surveillance technologies to African governments?

African citizens are increasingly being surveilled, profiled, and targeted online in ways that violate their rights. African governments frequently use pandemic or terrorism-related security risks to grant themselves additional surveillance rights and significantly increase their collection of monitoring apparatus and technologies while spending billions of dollars to conduct surveillance (Roberts et al. 2023). Surveillance is a prominent strategy African governments use to limit civic space (Roberts and Mohamed Ali 2021). Digital technologies are not the root of surveillance in Africa because surveillance practices predate the digital age (Munoriyarwa and Mare 2023). Surveillance practices were first used by colonial governments, continued by post-colonial governments, and are currently being digitalized and accelerated by African countries. Throughout history, surveillance has been passed down from colonizers to liberators, and some African leaders have now automated it (Roberts et al. 2023). Many studies have been conducted on illegal state surveillance in the United States, China, and Europe (Feldstein 2019; Feldstein 2021). Less is known about the supply of surveillance technologies to Africa. With a population of almost 1.5 billion people, Africa is a continent where many citizens face surveillance with malicious intent. As mentioned in previous chapters, documenting the dimensions and drivers of digital surveillance in Africa is